Edward Lear's "There was an Old Man of Thermopylæ"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2024
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s another weekly gimmerick here on the Daily Poem.
Edward Lear (12 May 1812 – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.
His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals, making coloured drawings during his journeys (which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books) and as a minor illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.
As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.
-bio via Wikipedia
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. |
| 0:04.1 | I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, August 12th, 2024. |
| 0:08.9 | And we have reached the time of the year when young people start going back to school. |
| 0:15.1 | I'm an educator who has students coming back into the classroom this week. |
| 0:19.8 | The local school districts in our area |
| 0:23.3 | are also starting up. I know plenty of homeschool families and co-ops that are also either |
| 0:29.1 | beginning or getting ready to begin. And so every student is either in the throes of or gearing up for the beginning of their academic year. |
| 0:41.9 | And it's always a bittersweet time. |
| 0:44.7 | Summer has usually dragged on long enough, |
| 0:47.9 | and yet there are freedoms and summer realities that even after you grow bored of them, you might prefer to |
| 0:56.7 | the rigor of the academic fall lifestyle that is upon you. So I thought this week to keep things |
| 1:06.3 | a little lighter. We're going to devote the week to the Limerick, which can be a controversial poetic form, |
| 1:17.3 | but it is a time-honored one. |
| 1:20.8 | The Limerick is a form of light verse that actually does have a pretty strict form. |
| 1:26.4 | They're typically five lines long, |
| 1:29.4 | with anapestic rhythm or meter to them, and a predictable rhyme scheme, AABBA. There is a famous |
| 1:40.4 | anonymous limerick. In fact, most well-known limericks are anonymous. They were very much a |
| 1:46.4 | kind of street humor, a casual kind of humorous verse that was approachable enough that |
| 1:51.9 | anybody could rattle off a limerick or churn one out with enough time and thought. And so they |
| 1:59.0 | became kind of a way of passing around memorable jokes. As you |
| 2:04.8 | probably discovered by now, listener, no matter where in your life you are, rhythm and rhyme |
| 2:12.4 | are the most powerful tools in making something memorable. And so you have numerous limericks that are |
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